


The Road to Humanity (and Back Again)

by May



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Body Horror, Escape from an alternate dimension, Eye Trauma, F/M, Transformation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-11
Updated: 2019-09-11
Packaged: 2020-12-27 03:09:02
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,936
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21111683
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/May/pseuds/May
Summary: A monster and a former archival assistant escape from another world.





	The Road to Humanity (and Back Again)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Nelja](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nelja/gifts).

It was like being flayed alive when Sasha died, except wasn’t just skin that was being peeled away, innards popping free of their moorings. It was more like her whole body was the skin, turned outwards to show its wet underside, and the rawness beneath was something else that was deeply integral. Her soul, perhaps.

It hurt up until it stopped, when Sasha arrived here, in this new place. The ground is dark, flat and barren, and running with rivers that have the rainbow shine of petrol. The sky is a dome of some corded, fleshly mass, and its sun is an eye that never closes. If it wasn’t its own colossal entity, it might be beautiful; its sclera shines like a pearl, and its iris is rich with colour. It might be hell, or purgatory: a place of judgement. It might just be the only afterlife there is, and for all the eldritch artifacts she might have dealt with, Sasha just never knew.

At first, it was hard not to meet the eye’s gaze, because the feeling of it on her back was so much worse. There are other eyes, too; they appear on the ground, in the dark earth, or in the water or, sometimes, as a bizarre flower, sprouting from the ground on a sinewy stem, eyelids parting as they bloom. But, none of these are as exhausting as the huge eye.

Sasha is not alone, here; solitary, faceless figures in cowls wander and never congregate together. When they notice her and turn to look at her from the darkness of the hoods, she can feel something boring into her mind. It’s an alien feeling, but one that’s oddly familiar at the same time, like something from a hidden childhood memory. But it’s unpleasant enough that she tries to avoid them.

Underneath the sun, one of them might stop, and look up. If they start shuffling along again, they’ll move a little faster. But, sometimes, they never do, and the cowl just collapses into a heap that never gets up, again. It’s unnerving, but it might have been worse if Sasha hadn’t already been murdered by some inhuman thing while being chased by a wall of flesh-eating worms, which wasn’t even related to the thing that killed her, as far as she knew.

There are other things, here. Vaguely humanoid things riddled with holes that look like gaping eye sockets that run with viscous, bloody fluid, the ends of severed nerves hanging and flailing when they move. They have mouths in the right place, though these hang open in rictus screams. Sasha doesn’t see these nearly as often as she does the cowled figures, but she closes her eyes when she does. But it’s hard not to open them, again.

She wanders back and forth across the strange earth, but nothing seems to change. There are no cities or vast seas or even hills or valleys to break up the open plains. She decides to believe she just hasn’t found them yet; maybe there is a city, somewhere, teeming with people, as mundane and clockwork as London. Maybe regular people live regular lives beneath the giant eye. They could look up at it and discuss it as if it were rain or sun.

She hasn’t seen that eye so much as blink. It doesn’t seem to sleep.

The only things to make a difference in the landscape are the small pools of dark water. Her reflection stares back through the petroleum-rainbow film, and it is never any different than it had been when she was alive. Sometimes an eye rises up on the surface like a bubble, before it pops into nothing. The liquid looks as if it should be viscous, but it’s smooth and yielding when she runs her fingers through it. Sasha is never hungry or thirsty. That makes it easier not to think about what the other things here eat.

Once or twice, Sasha has walked towards the great eye, so it hangs straight ahead and above, to see if it was possible to stand directly underneath it. It isn’t, always keeping the same distance no matter how much she walks, but the corded sky seems to shift and flex when she tries that.

The nearest Sasha ever gets to one of the cowled figures is a few feet. She stares at its back, her breath catching in her throat. It isn’t breathing, and is as still as a statue, or a corpse stood upright, and it casts no shadow. It waits, and Sasha waits with it, until it crumples into a heap.

As the eye stares into the back of her head, Sasha reaches out to snatch the fallen cowl. There is nothing underneath, not bones or a pile of eviscerated skin or anything else that would suggest something that could once walk. The fabric is loose in her hands, and it’s a thick fabric, like some kind of sacking and a dusty black. It seems strangely ordinary.

Maybe because of that, she decides to keep it. If it fills out with another body in time, or if somebody comes for it, she’ll deal with that when it happens. Maybe something wants to cover its monstrous appearance, or hide itself from the eye. Or maybe even another person will turn up, looking for something that was theirs all along.

Completely unfolded, the cowl is a large piece of fabric just big enough to use as a tent. She finds a couple of the eye-plants sprouting from the ground, waving slightly from side to side. She’s sure they watch her as she wrenches their stems from the ground, but she keeps her own eyes on her hand. To her relief, the eyes wither away when she does that, and she’s left with two rigid sticks, corded like twisted muscle. They’re all she has to use, but they’re long enough to prop the tent up, wedging the material underneath them in the ground.

There is relief in being hidden. For the first time, she’s unseen by the vast eye, and she doesn’t have to see it, either. She also doesn’t have to see the shambling, eyeless monstrosities that make their way around every so often. Nothing here has made any attempt to hurt her, but sometimes it’s just looking that’s frightening, like childhood nightmares. There’s a little power to be found in hiding, in shutting yourself away. As if in response, an eye pops up in the dirt beside her, watches her for a moment, before winking out of existence, again.

This way, Sasha has two levels of darkness protecting her. But it’s really been a long time since something really bothered her; there was five seconds at the end of her life, granted. Working in the archives storage rooms got progressively less and less strange. Everything, all the monsters and all of the artifacts, were things to be cataloged. This place must be shoving her mind up against everything without any sort of reprieve.

She can remain in the tent for quite some time, since she doesn’t need to eat or drink. Time is difficult to gauge, here, unless she sits and counts the seconds in her head, one by one. She does not need to sleep, either, although that would be something to do.

Footsteps are what brings Sasha out. They’re unlike anything else she’s heard here. These are solid and crunching, like somebody walking on the sand of a stony beach or on the gravel in some driveway.

Sasha lifts the edge of the tent. There are two feet in scuffed shoes with tied shoelaces, and a pair of trouser hems. She can see the factory stitching, and can almost imagine the Marks and Spencers label. It’s a jolt of sudden normality.

She looks up. The newcomer is tall, their outline reddened by the fleshy sky, like some ungodly halo.  
They even seem to have golden ringlets to add to the strange parody. It reminds her of somebody who is both left of correct but familiar enough that she could imagine him walking down an overcast street, past reflective shop windows or seated across from her in some cafe. Put a strange thing against a stranger background, and it might look ordinary.

“I know you.” The voice is lesser, here, like its been compressed and flattened by the air itself. “Archivist’s assistant. Sasha. Am I correct?”

He brings something vaguely discordant, like a flat note. If Sasha’s choice is between that and eternal silence, it might be hard to pick.

“Michael,” she says. He still doesn’t look like a Michael. But perhaps a cowled figure is named Bob, and a shambling horror, Frank.

“What are you doing here?” It’s the first time she’s spoken out loud since she died. It sounds so flatly human. “Is this place something to do with you?”

Michael’s eyes are glassy and pale blue, like they’ve been deliberately fixed in his face. “No,” he says. “I’m here because somebody seems to have quite the sense of humour.”

He laughs, his mocking, unearthly giggle feels more wry than it should. It anchors it, somehow.

“You died? But I didn’t think that you could…”

“Oh, I can’t,” he says. “But I can.”

“What do you mean?”

He examines her face for a moment. He’s back to making you think he knows some hideous joke on you. He smiles his shark smile. It’s too big.

“Oh, yes,” he says.“There’s so much you don’t know, isn’t there? So much that Jon and his other assistants found out after you were gone.”

Hearing those names is like looking down an old tunnel at something ancient. Too distant to feel much grief.

“Like what?” she says. “Is this the afterlife, since we’re both dead?”

Michael gives a shrug, like a loose stringed puppet. “All you need to know now is that this place is nothing of mine,” he says. “It’s hardly ideal for either of us.”

“But you know about it, at least?” says Sasha. She gestures around them, at the sky, at the eyes on the ground. “Is this all there is?”

Michael tilts his head, making his smile crooked as his hair tumbles to the side. “I could show you, if you like? It would take a while.”

Sasha hesitates. A while with Michael is not ideal, but she doesn’t even know what ideal would be, now.

“I’ll understand if you don’t want to go anywhere with me,” he says. “I can understand if you want to stay here inside your little tent, hiding from the eye, hiding from whatever else is here.”

“I wasn’t hiding,” protests Sasha. “I just wanted to stop all of the seeing.”

“Yours, or theirs?”

“...Both.”

“I see,” says Michael. He turns away, and begins his ambling gait across the dark ground. “Well, you’re certainly welcome to join me. I’m not sure I can even do anything to you, even if I wanted to. Not here.”

“How do I know you’re not lying?”

Michael stops and twists his head round to look at her. Here, it might be easier to get used to that.

“You don’t,” he says, evenly. “But, Sasha, look at your options. Have you seen anybody around here willing to talk to you? And, if I took you, at least it would be a change of scenery. You might even meet people.”

He laughs, and it floats eerily on the still air. It’s so strange and familiar that Sasha isn’t sure how well it tethers him to London.

“I’d rather not be stuck in whatever dark place you take people,” says Sasha.

He frowns, his whole face drooping like empty sackcloth. “What are you talking about?” he says. “Darkness isn’t mine. You’d be able to see.”

“I’d still prefer not to.”

“Like I said, I don’t think I can, anyway. So, if you want to believe me, you’d be completely safe. From me, anyway.”

Sasha starts watching him lope away, his laughter still echoing a little.

“What do you mean, the darkness isn’t yours?” she says.

He turns again, and smiles. “You don’t know about that, either, do you?” he says. “In some ways, you’re lucky you’re dead.”

The first new thing that Sasha has encountered in a long time inspires curiosity. That was what made her apply for a job at the archives in the first place.

“If I come with you, will you promise to tell me what the hell you’re talking about?” she says.

Michael smirks like somebody smeared the expression into clay. “Don’t think I’m desperate for you to follow me,” he says. “But I might decide to tell you. I’m sure you’ve noticed how boring it is, here.”

“Okay, then. Just, please wait a moment.” Sasha pulls up her tent, wrapping the material around the severed eye stems. She can feel Michael watch her do it.

They walk side by side, their footsteps crunching against the ground in unison. Michael has been silent for a while, and Sasha feels the stare of the giant eye above. Being stuck with Michael might be something of an ironic hell, but at least there’s two of them to share the burden of the eye’s gaze.

Sasha nimbly sidesteps an eye popping up from the ground in their path. Michael glances at it, ever so briefly.

“So, what did you mean when you said ‘darkness isn’t yours’?” she says.

Michael’s straw-coloured hair covers his face as he watches the floor, possibly looking for errant eyeballs. 

“Because it belongs to something else,” he says, as though it was the most obvious answer. It is, kind of, if Sasha remembers what she did learn from the archives.

“You know what I mean,” pressed Sasha. “Who does it belong to?”

“More of a what,” he says. “Like me.”

“What is it, then?” she says.

“The church of the divine host is one name,” says Michael. “Surely you’ve at least heard of that one.”

Sasha recognises the name; some piece of arcane religious paraphernalia or other had it, plus she investigated one or two people who were linked to it.

“It’s a cult,” she says. “Do you not have a cult, then? The church of the amazing…whatever you are?”

He stops and looks at her, his round face twisted into a sneer, like it’s been molded that way. But Sasha can’t resist the urge to smirk. It is gratifying to prickle him.

“I have had cults,” he says. “Before I had a human name, when I was truly unfathomable.”

“You’re still pretty weird,” says Sasha, wryly. “Enough that you had to give yourself a name.”

Michael says nothing. He brings his foot down onto a sprouting eye. It explodes into viscera under his foot.

“You’re different,” says Michael, later, as they’ve crossed yet more barren land.

“From you? Yeah, I’d hope so,” replies Sasha.

“No,” he says. “Are you hungry?”

“No thanks,” says Sasha. She grimaces at the thought of the kind of food he must eat. 

“Oh, I wasn’t offering,” says Michael. “I’m not hungry, either. Which is good because you’re not giving me anything to feed on.”

Sasha can barely withhold a shudder. “Oh, I’m glad,” she says. “But what do you mean by that?”

Michael shakes his head, his ringlets bouncing. “Nothing you should worry about, it seems.”

Sasha is about to demand more answers when she hears dirt being shuffled aside. It suggests an irregular gait, unrhythmic. She begins to unravel her tent, retrieving the eye stalks bundled inside. Michael looks at them, and a dark smile spreads across his face.

“Oh, Sasha,” he trills. “What are those?”

“They’re for my tent,” Sasha gets to wedging the stalks into the ground. “I think we should sit down for a while.”

She drapes the material over the stalks, Michael watching her curiously, tilting his head to the side. Too far, she thinks, he’s tilting it too far.

“Did those sticks come from the eye stalks?” he asks, his voice carrying a note of deadly innocence.

Sasha makes sure that her tent is sturdy. “They did.” She looks up, and he’s looking at her like he’s won some prize. “Needs must.”

“Impressive,” he says.

Sasha ignores his obvious goading and pulls aside the fabric of the tent. “I’m getting inside, you’re welcome to join me, I guess.”

Michael stares at her, again, as if he’s found a strange animal. “Why?” he says. “We don’t need food, drink or rest, here.”

Sasha glares at him. “Fine,” she says.

As the shuffling approaches, Sasha disappears into the tent. Perhaps Michael will try something with the creature, and she resists the urge to lift the edge of the tent to sate her curiosity.

Michael’s face appears beneath the edge of the tent like a monster beneath a child’s bed.

“How fascinating,” he says.

He crawls in, and his folded limbs fill all of the space not taken by Sasha.

“I’m so glad I don’t need to sleep,” she says.

“I don’t need to sleep,” he says. “Did that creature make you run and hide? Interesting! It probably won’t hurt you. I’m not sure it really can.”

He stares at her with unblinking eyes. They’re too big, like old marbles, or china plates, and so bright. Sasha doesn’t want to tell him anything.

“Is it still out there?” she asks.

“It is.” Michael’s bizarre hands press into the dirt, and his limbs fold up again and again.

“Okay,” she says. “I just don’t want to see it.”

“And you’d rather stay in here, looking at me,” he says. He grins, all of his teeth pressed strangely into the shape of his skull.

“I think I will,” she says. “What are you doing?”

Behind him, an eye manifests in the sackcloth of the tent, and focuses on the back of his head. If Michael knows it’s there, he doesn’t show it.

“I’m trying to open a door,” he says. “But I can’t do it.”

For the first time ever, he seems vulnerable.

“I don’t like looking at them,” says Sasha.

Michael titters. “I know that,” he says. “Humans just can’t stand so much as looking at things, sometimes. It’s part of what makes you all such good prey.”

“So, you do eat people.”

“In a way,” he says. His eyes shine, just a little. “Imagine you were just a mouth and a stomach and livestock just wandered in there, and that is how you feed on them.”

“So, like, you dissolve them inside you?”

“No,” he says, and a smirk is beginning to appear on his lips. “The livestock doesn’t ever really need to die. It’s best if it doesn’t. A corpse can’t be scared.”

“Scared?” says Sasha. “So, you need people to be alive, but scared?”

Michael gives her an open-mouthed grin, as if there was a loose hinge in his jaw. “Yes,” he says. “But I can’t open doors, here.”

It’s almost a genial conversation, and Sasha has an urge to know so much more.

“So what about the entities that aren’t you?”

Nothing has changed since they started travelling again. The eye is forever watching, and the sky flexes whenever they go in certain directions. The other beings here have become scarce, Sasha has noticed.

“There’s fourteen,” says Michael. “Both as individuals but also as a spectrum.”

When he is finished, it’s more than Sasha had ever realised. It’s information that she feels like savouring, almost.

One of the eyeless things is passing by again, so they’re back inside the tent. The tent feels bigger, and it’s because Michael feels smaller. Neater.

Sasha wants to know more.

“The Stranger.” Sasha catches him grimacing at this, and she could almost believe he has the regular push and pull of muscle and bone under his skin. The Stranger and the Corruption are his least favourites. “That’s the one that killed me, right?”

“Yes.” Michael’s eyes shine like old glass. “It killed you and then became you. And then everybody thought that was you.”

Death and distance has a dampening effect on how she might feel about that. Small mercies, perhaps.

“And the Archives are run by the Beholding.”

“Interesting, is it not?”

“It makes a lot of sense, I’ve got to admit.”

Eventually, Michael sees one of the cowled figures, and the question of whether they were avoiding him or not piques Sasha’s interest.

When she sees one, she grabs Michael’s arm. She’s almost distracted by how human it feels. Muscle and skin and bone.

“What can you tell me about those?” she asks.

Michael glances over and, in profile, he might look all the more human. At least, if Sasha focuses on the curve of his snub nose.

When he glances over at the figure, it sets his face in profile. Sasha stares at his snub nose while she waits for him to tell her what he knows.

“Those are the ones who live here,” he says. “Guardians. Avatars.”

“They’ve been rarer since you came,” notes Sasha.

When he smiles, it makes him look less human, again.

“I don’t think they like me, much,” he says.

“Figures,” mutters Sasha. “Are they people?”

“No.” Michael’s smile grows broader. “Not as such. At least, not so recently.”

“Compared to who? Me?”

“Yes,” he says, and his smile grows wry. “But also the others.”

It doesn’t take Sasha more than a second. “Those are things are human?” she says. It’s horrible, but fascinating.

“Yes,” he says. “After being fed on so much.”

“By who?”

“This whole place!” Michael pauses for a moment. “Didn’t you know?”

“Know what?”

“What this place is?” he says.

“No? I thought it was some kind of afterlife.”

“The Beholding has taken this world,” says Michael. “And fed on it.”

“Is it our world?” asks Sasha. “Is this the future?”

“Why would you assume that? Not everything revolves around you,” he says, archly. “Did you really think that nobody has ever taken a world, before? Never gorged itself on it until it had nothing left.”

“So this isn’t Earth?”

“It might be,” he says. “But it’s some other Earth in some other place.”

When one of the former humans crawls past, they retire to the the tent, as Sasha digests what she’s learned. She sits next to Michael, now. He’s much better company than she thought, especially since he has interesting things to say.

“Why do you think we’re here?” she says.

“You were an archivist’s assistant,” says Michael. “It might just be where you go.”

Sasha turns to see him outstaring an eye on the opposite wall of the tent, a conclusion gestating within her mind.

Michael leaves without her, and she finds him staring into one of the pools of water dotted around the landscape. She joins him, and it appears that he’s nervous about his undistorted reflection. He blinks and frowns at the fact he doesn’t look like a monster, even baring his teeth to see if his smile might still stretch.

Sasha wants to crawl inside his head, to worm her way behind his face. She wants his every word, so she puts her hands on face and kisses him. It brings her back to something she might have been, before.

The horizon splits and, on the other side, the sky is grey, the ground is concrete, and the old bricks of the Magnus Institute stand before them.

Michael is no longer unfathomable, and he makes a face as she delves into his mind.

Sasha kisses him. “I’m not going to sacrifice you, don’t worry.”

Michael Shelley pauses for a moment, then sighs. “I thought so.”


End file.
